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Grass Grown Over Collapsing Trenches

If you’re younger than 34, it happened when you were still in school. And it shouldn’t blow my mind that people who were toddlers on 9/11 have graduated from high school – but it does.

Put another way – if 9/11 were December 7, we’d be in 1956; the war would have ended 12 years ago; Elvis would be at his peak, Germany and Japan would be back from the stone age and rebuilding their economies, and we’d be on the brink of the space race. Tempus fugit.

After the attacks, one of the social undercurrents – which morphed, as social currents do, into comedy that often tried too hard – was the notion that if we gave up our freedoms out of fear of terror, then “the terrorists will win”.

So today, 16 years later, government goons grope us in line at airports (but miss all the dangerous stuff anyway), and we don’t complain because, well, we gotta make our flights; the whole exercise seems designed more to train people to get in line and shut up than to find terrorists.

We fill out paperwork if our bank deposits are too big. We watch as our police departments turn into playtime special forces teams, chasing after pot dealers and trial skippers with armored cars and assault rifles. We see our Fourth Amendment gradually being reduced to toilet paper – and, in parts of the country where the people are more amenable to presenting their papers on demand, the Second as well.

And on the campuses where the generation that has the same memory of 9/11 that I have of Barry Goldwater (hint: I was a toddler) are getting “educated”, people are being badgered into line by social codes imposed by self-appointed cultural police no less zealous than the Wahhabi morality police, enforcing a social code that are no less absurd than the rules, and rulers, in Afghanistan 16 years and one day ago today – enforced (!), in some cases, by people whose only difference from ISIS’s morality police is that they haven’t cut off anyone’s head.

Yet.

I’m less and less sure this nation – or at least it’s self-appointed culturaloverlords – learned the right lessons from 9/11.

17 thoughts on “Grass Grown Over Collapsing Trenches”

The liberals have always been ashamed of America and freedom in general. That hasn’t changed. They had to hide the more obvious signs of that after 9/11, but their true colors flew free under Obama. The problem for the libs is that Obama was an affirmative action president and now that we’ve been there and done that, it’ll be harder to get another in his mold to pull the wool over American’s eyes.

When Trump actually starts to perform, that is, achieve goals that positively affect the American people (this does not mean he gets to claim “wins” for himself) I’m sure we will still be underwhelmed.

“. . . Obama’s last fiscal year . . . .” I don’t know, is it meaningful to talk about a fiscal year if you never had a budget, merely an endless series of continuing resolutions kicking the crisis one step farther down the road? Or doesn’t that matter since everything was Bush’s fault, including 9/11, which occurred during Clinton’s last fiscal year?

I used to wonder how Liberals with TDS manage to avoid being committed but I’ve noticed beggars at freeway ramps work in shifts. Maybe they hide out when responsible adults come around? Is that what you do, Emery?

Emery, I feel saddened that you felt it necessary to shift the discourse into the arena of ad hominem attacks and ill founded accusations – not at all what I expected from someone appealing to rationality.

Trump won because Clinton was his opponent and identity politics was her game. Little did she know that Trump is the master, and he knew how to find the biggest, newest group of victims of them all: white men. And we yearn to belong to a tribe. A skillful politician uses that very human trait.

Trump did well with blacks and “working class” whites because he opposed illegal immigration that has depressed their wages and unfair trade deals that have shipped jobs overseas. He’s the first politician to take the side of the bottom half of the income distribution for citizens and he took quite a chance, being the only politician at the time who was willing to go against Establishment wisdom that “amnesty” and “free” trade were inevitable, good things.

What did Hillary do? She told coal miners they’d lose their jobs under her administration and be stuck with worthless training for jobs that would never appear in their areas. Same with manufacturing, she said she’d impose controls and mandates on what factories could open and do rather than try and grow jobs in that sector.

What Trump did wasn’t “skillful” politics. You want skillful politics look at Slick Willy, who sold the working class a bill of goods and then delivered the gold to the managerial and technocratic classes by signing NAFTA and giving China MFN status. He knew the score and even told Hillary she needed to go to the Midwest and campaign, yet she blew him off.

Trump won with the old Reagan Coalition: working class voters and conservatives. Hillary went out of her way to drive away the working class. So what did you expect to them to do? You want to win them back, then Bernie’s message on trade might resonate, but the way the Democrats are talking about illegal immigration won’t win them many friends in the working class.

No accomplishments by Trump? Neil Gorsuch. Close to a hundred billion dollars per year in regulatory costs cut. Looking to reverse Obama’s attempt to legislate the laws of physics via impossible CAFE standards. Terminating some of Obama’s illegal immigration diktats.

Lmao…Emery, you should kneel down, every day, and thank Berg for not doxxing you…and the local janitorial service should curse him for depriving them of the finest commode cleaner they ever dreamed of.